Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Guess which particular religion this article is about? Yup, the Catholic Church. Seems the Jesuits have been dumping child-raping priests on Alaska for a VERY long time. I've read it once, and the details are hard to stomach, so I'm not block-quoting much here, except this little tidbit about the "Holy Father"...

(I)n the midst of negotiations to settle four claims of clerical sex abuse with the Diocese of Fairbanks, one of the church's mediators told Ken Roosa (an attorney representing the accusers--CN) that the dioceses didn't want to offer more than $10,000. "They said they couldn't offer more money to an Alaska Native because they'd just get drunk and hurt each other," Roosa said. "And it would just encourage more victims to come forward. Unbelievable."

In September 2005, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who'd just become the pope—asked the justice department of the Bush administration to grant him immunity from prosecution in sex-abuse cases in the United States. Ratzinger, the onetime head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was accused of "conspiring to cover up the sexual molestation of three boys by a seminarian" in Texas, according to the Associated Press. Ratzinger had "written in Latin to bishops around the world, explaining that 'grave' crimes such as the sexual abuse of minors would be handled by his congregation. The proceedings of special church tribunals handling the cases were subject to 'pontifical secret,'" Ratzinger's letter said. The Bush administration granted Ratzinger the immunity.

Translation: We'll take care of this issue the way we always have: By hiding behind a phony piety that others are too cowardly to challenge, covering up a bunch of irredeemable predators, and rewarding the people who sweep it under the rug.

This is why, even if I could believe in a god, I'd never, ever, ever go back to being a Catholic. The Catholic "Church" should be treated as a criminal conspiracy to enable and cover for rapists. Dan Savage put it best (paraphrasing) by saying if any group other than a major religion repeatedly harbored and sheltered as many perverts as this, the public would be burning its buildings and calling for investigations. The Church? Not so much.